Re: Small Type in books, snow

In a message dated 1/4/03 12:26:42 PM Eastern Standard Time, ECPep@aol.com 
writes:


> Jack Elliot's book is a Timber Press edition, at least mine is.  The print 
> is 
> so small you may need a large hand lens to read it.   Maybe Bill will tell 
> us 
> why this book is shrunk into an exercise in eyestrain, it is such a good 
> book.

The primary reason for using very small type, Claire, is of course to print 
the whole book in fewer pages, thus costing less to manufacture. In some 
instances, an editor or marketing "expert" may equate smaller type with a 
more scholarly appearance, but I suspect saving pages was the reason. It may 
also be that if the book was previously published elsewhere, Timber got the 
typesetting files as part of the deal and changing the type size to a larger 
size would have thrown off paging, placement of illustrations and tables, and 
so on, also adding to the cost. 

We forget sometimes that publishers really have to make a profit on the books 
they put in the marketplace. They have to balance the retail price with the 
manufacturing cost. They generally have publishing plans that require a 
certain return on any title published--and the sales must not only recover 
manufacturing cost but a pre-determined amount of company overhead (rent, 
equipment, salaries, etc.). It could be that with projected unit sales at a 
certain retail price, they had to keep the page count down to hit the target 
return on investment (ROI) in order to even be able to publish the book--I've 
certainly been in that seat myself at times. So the publisher may have been 
in the position of having to decide: Do I use really small type so I can keep 
a lower page count and higher profit margin, or do I have to give up 
publishing this title at all.

My guess is that in this case it was an ROI decision.
Bill Lee

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